Despite the drastic relative devaluation of standard patents in the U.S., Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) continues to pioneer new industry standard smartphone and telecommunications technologies. Samsung announced this week that it had completed trials of the core technology it hopes will make up the fifth generation (5G) wireless standard.

The era of 4G LTE is still young, but Samsung is already cooking up a faster replacement, 5G. According to Samsung the technology will allow you to download a full length movie over the air in less than a second. Versus LTE, which tops out at around 75 megabits-per-second (Mbps), 5G will offer blazing speeds of up to tens of gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

The bad news is that Samsung says the technology likely won't hit the market till 2020.

And the other bad news is that the technology has a lot of hurdles to overcome to achieve commercial viability -- it required 64 antennas for Samsung to achieve its record result.

Still with China and the European Union investing big in the development of the next generation standard, and top electronics firms like Samsung stepping up to the plate, it seems that a solution will eventually be found.

Looks like you only get the first 7Gb at full-speed. Then they'll likely throttle you to ~20k, like T-Mobile does to us.

Also, while Straight Talk (and maybe others) does offer truly unlimited data (which never gets throttled - it should be illegal to refer to something as "unlimited" if it can be throttled), they don't allow you to use their service to tether/hotspot for other devices. I would guess that AIO does the same.

That limitation has to go to make cellular wifi a real "broadband" option for people who can't get cable or DSL. With those limitations in place (throttling, caps, and no tethering/wifi) it's kind of just a cruel hoax.

How it works is it attempts to use Wifi for phone service instead of a carrier the drawback if switching out of Wifi over to a cell tower your guaranteed to drop connection but its an interesting concept and might work well for a lot of people who are in free cell areas. If you work for a coffee shop or McDonalds with Free Wifi and then your at Home with Wifi then Why not. My company has a guest Wifi for vendors which I could leverage so I did consider this.

Straight Talk.I will say this since I put the wife on Straight Talk and this really irks me is she gets better service and data using Straight Talk then when we were direct on Sprint. Going from Sprint on a Samsung Epic 4g $75.00 a month to Sprint on an LG Optimus Q for $45.00 a month was a major improvement. The issue with Straight talk is you need sim based device to bring your own over or your limited to the poor selection of phones they offer.

For the record im on a Windows Phone on AT&T through a corporate device.

Cheaper options for service are coming but the coverage is the issue and the big carriers are getting into the lower cost space I would imagine to deter growth from services like Cricket.

How does that help people who have no access to cable or DSL? The point is that those people generally have to use something like a cellular data service in order to get internet at all - and hence are living under the data cap for everything they do...not just cell phone usage.